WordPress Security Mistakes that Make you Vulnerable to Hackers

The biggest problem with WordPress security is that users put themselves at risk without knowing. Seemingly innocent habits could be making you vulnerable to hackers. Fortunately, keeping WordPress secure is not actually that difficult. It just requires a few basic tweaks to your current setup.

Using “admin” as your username

Early versions of WordPress created a default user named admin. This meant that nearly every WordPress site on the planet had an admin user. Unless you manually deleted it, it was there.

This created WordPress security issues because it made it easy to break in to your site. If a hacker wanted to break in, all he had to do was try the admin username with a bunch of password combinations. This process can be automated to try hundreds of passwords per minute until it finds a combo that works. Or until your server crashes. This is called a brute force attack.

WordPress has gotten smarter over the years, and it no longer forces users to create admin. Now you can name your primary user anything you want. But there are tons of WordPress sites created before this change took place, so it’s still the first username hackers will try. If you still have a user named admin on your WordPress site, it’s time to get rid of it.

Keeping unused plugins, themes, and user accounts

Unnecessary bloat doesn’t just affect your site performance, it also affects your security. Every extra user account is another portal for brute force hackers. Every extra plugin is another plugin that you have to update. It’s always best to keep your website as slim and trim as it can be.

Not installing a security plugin

Even with the above security measures in place, stuff can still happen. That’s why it’s nice to have a WordPress security plugin in place.

A good security plugin can provide extra preventative measures to keep your site secure. It can also monitor your website and alert you when things go wrong. Remember that: prevention and monitoring. Those are the two most important words in WordPress security.

Using weak passwords

We all know that weak passwords are a security threat. And yet, for whatever reason, we all keep using them. We know we shouldn’t, but we can’t help ourselves.

Using strong passwords is one of the easiest ways to keep your website secure. And it’s not difficult to do. WordPress has a password generator built in that will create a strong password for you.